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Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Jean-Claude Bradley, Blue Obelisk award winner

There are nowadays a lot of people talking about Open, about open access, open data, open source. In fact, some discussion on Twitter resulted in the realization that it is highly unlikely that any scholar has not taken advantage of Open in some way in their research in the last few years. However, this is mostly due to people whom actually do, not by those who talk about it or use it.

One of the few people in chemistry who did both promoting Open and doing Open was Jean-Claude Bradley. Yesterday, I heard the sad news that he passed away. This is a great loss to many of us and certainly to the open chemistry community. Jean-Claude received the Blue Obelisk award for his Open Notebook Science work back in 2007 (I handed him the obelisk at the ACS meeting in Chicago; thanx to Chris for taking the picture, and digging it up!) and he contributed much to the community, among which his melting point and solubility data for organic compounds.

A proud me handing out the Blue Obelisk award to Jean-Claude in Chicago in 2007.
CC-BY 2007 Christoph Steinbeck.

Jean-Claude did some work together, including a book chapter, which I liked being a trained organic chemist myself (well, just a 6 month minor during my M.Sc. on supramolecular chemistry). I was really pleased that he had accepted to become part of the eNanoMapper scientific advisory board, and I was very much looking forward to working with him again on the journal side of dissemination of nanosafety research, in his role as editor-in-chief of Chemistry Central Journal.

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This blog deals with chemblaics in the broader sense. Chemblaics (pronounced chem-bla-ics) is the science that uses computers to solve problems in chemistry, biochemistry and related fields. The big difference between chemblaics and areas such as chem(o)?informatics, chemometrics, computational chemistry, etc, is that chemblaics only uses open source software, open data, and open standards, making experimental results reproducible and validatable. And this is a big difference!

About Me

Assistant professor at the Dept of Bioinformatics - BiGCaT at NUTRIM, Maastricht University, studying biology at an unsupervised and atomic level. Open Science is my main hobby resulting in participation in, among many others, Bioclipse, CDK and WikiPathways. ORCID:0000-0001-7542-0286. Posts on G+ are personal.

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